Nut Bars and Loony Tunes

Have you ever wondered what it is about end-of-the-road spots, that they seem to attract a disproportionate share of the lunatic fringe? I’m talking about places like Key West or Provincetown or deepest Idaho, communities where the road ends, where you have to stop and can’t run any farther and where your warped imagination can take root and find like-minded adherents. They seem to be full of folks who are convinced the end of the world is near. They draw conspiracy buffs of every hue; people who see the big bad wolf of some government or another behind every negative headline. People who hear voices, who refuse to go to the dentist for fear they will end up with a radio receiver in their choppers, who are convinced that their telephone is bugged by the CIA; men, as well as women, I suppose, who live totally off the grid, because they are afraid the agents of darkness are lurking everywhere and are ready to pounce on them, if they raise their heads above the horizon. Some act as if they are in the Witness Protection Program. They see enemies behind every telephone pole. Mum’s the word with them.

I live in such a place. This is an island in the Georgia Straits, about a 20-minute seaplane ride or a two-hour ferry trip southwest of Vancouver in British Columbia. It’s a beautiful, small and unspoiled island, about 38 square miles in size. Half of it is part of the Gulf Islands National Park. Some 350 permanent residents call it home, give or take a few. This total goes up substantially in the summer due to cottagers and visitors, who come to enjoy the natural beauty of the place. The island is called Saturna.

Among the people who live here are quite a few Americans, like myself, and ex-Americans, mainly people who fled the Vietnam-era draft and found this remote island welcoming. Most settled to earn a living as tradesmen and blended into the local society. Some of them came wrapped in the security blanket of a trust fund and didn’t have to work too hard to make a living here. Some are outright fruitcakes. I should be familiar with this set-up, since I spent a lot of time in Key West and observed that scene up close or maybe I am the fruit cake and they are the real deal. Who knows?

It’s tough to stay sane on this island. The nut bars and loony tunes have taken hold here. To give you an example, there are some who are convinced that many influential Jews in Germany were high-ranking members of the SS and in cahoots with Hitler. According to their theory, it was the Zionists on both sides who pulled the strings and who pushed the war for their own profit, that Hitler was but a puppet.

There are quite a few islanders who believe that the CIA, together with the Mossad, was behind the 9/11 attack, that it was done to justify the war on terror to benefit the military-industrial complex, whatever that is. Some of them believe that their enemies, whoever they are, are all around them and spying on them. They have pretty much isolated themselves from the rest of the community. Perhaps they enjoy living outside society. They did it once, why not twice.

There are some on this island, who believe that the world will come to a cataclysmic end
around December 21, 2012, when the Mayan Long Count Calendar comes to a close. They are preparing for Armageddon. I’m planning a big party that day, an end-of-the-world bash. Bring your own poison.

I haven’t run across any religious nuts here yet, but maybe they are just keeping a low profile. I wouldn’t be at all surprised, though, if they were getting the Kool-Aid ready.

When you’re talking to some people here, it’s important that you know whether they are on their meds and in control of themselves or whether they are hallucinating. The political views of many of them teeter on the extreme left wing of the spectrum. Many of them seem very unhappy folks, who feel the need to change the world to conform to their view on things.

You might say that this is not all that different from where you live. The difference is that if you live in the city, the few knobs here and there disappear in the crowd. They are not in your face day after day with their paranoia, as they are here in this small community.

On top of that, this island is divided pretty much down the middle into two mutually exclusive groups, the “us” and “them” camps. Depending on which side you are on, the “us” faction are the good guys and the “them” bloc are the devil incarnate. They avoid social contact with each other, don’t go to the others’ functions and don’t talk to each other, unless absolutely necessary. Both camps are the source of wild rumors, whispers and innuendos about each other.

On one side of this imaginary fault line are many of those who settled here in the 1970s, mainly Americans on the run from the draft. Many of them are against change, because any change will disrupt paradise as they define it. They have forgotten that their arrival on this island caused major disruption. They consider those who settled here after them as interlopers and fat cats, who’re trying to ruin paradise. Most of the unhinged fall into this category.

On the other side of the chasm are many whose families have lived here since the 1940s and 50s and those who came here in the last 15 to 20 years. Some of the former are major landowners here, whose parents came and worked the land, made it habitable and who eked out a living from farming and logging. Some of the latter are well-off retirees, who’ve built themselves summer homes along the rugged shores of this island. Because they don’t reside here year-around, they are often referred to as tourists, in other words people who don’t contribute anything substantial to life on this island, just pollute the place and cause congestion on the island’s few roads and strain scarce facilities. Others are perceived as the filthy rich or as one woman here put it, “the fascists on the hill.”

I don’t know where she got that idea, but I have not met any fascists on this island, ok, maybe one, and I would know one if I saw one. I grew up among them. I also don’t know what filthy rich is anymore. Most of the seemingly really well-off I knew in my previous life were mortgaged to the hilt and beyond. Their life resembled a Potemkin village, a fake façade that any hiccup in the economy could knock over. So who are these “rich” people on this island? They are mostly people who have worked very hard all their lives and have retired here to enjoy some of the fruits of their labors.

At least in places like Key West, the unstable fringe provides the color. Every evening at sunset on Mallory Square, there are guys with iguanas draped around their necks, fire eaters, wire acts, fortune tellers, vendors of exotic cookies and herbs, jugglers, bare-chested couples chained together by their nipples or noses, acrobats and raving madmen who preach about fire and brimstone. In other words, they are the entertainment that keeps the tourists coming, when the brilliant sunsets get monotonous. Not so on Saturna. Here the crazed are anything but entertaining. In fact, they are tedious as hell. They are suspicious of their own shadow and their paranoia only lets them open up among the like-minded and behind closed doors. They are no fun at all.

I’m looking for inspiration to get the nutters to contribute to the entertainment, to create a buzz about Saturna. Any ideas?

Humor In The Good Old Days

I came across a photograph of my grandfather the other day. It was one of those sepia prints and it shows him sitting in a straight-backed chair, sporting a white moustache and a van Dyke. He doesn’t smile and he looks like a man with whom one wouldn’t want to trifle. I never knew my father’s father. He died at age 72 the year before I was born. He was a forester and game warden like his father before him and he had a reputation as a man who could shoot straight, drink hard and didn’t suffer fools lightly. He managed the forests of the largest landowner in the area for the sum of 100 gold marks a year. According to my father, that was a fabulous salary in the years before World War I. The locals considered him a rich man.

In the photograph he didn’t look like a man with a sense of humor. Nevertheless, my father insisted that he did have one, of sorts. You be the judge. My father told me the story of the hunting guest my grandfather’s employer asked him to guide on a deer hunt. He was a banker from Frankfurt and the baron owed him a favor. Either the patron indicated to my grandfather to get rid of this banker or my grandfather didn’t think much of this city slicker and decided to short-circuit his hunting adventure. Anyway, the reasons for what followed remain unclear. What is clear is that the banker had an unforgettable hunting adventure.

Here’s what happened. Apparently in the years around the turn of the last century French eucalyptus lozenges were a very popular cough medicine. They were sold in small flat tins. These bonbons, as they were called, were oval and about ½ of an inch long, brown-green in color and bore an uncanny resemblance to weathered deer droppings. Unless you looked closely, these cough drops were indistinguishable from the real thing. You pretty much had to touch and handle them to know one from the other.

The evening before he was supposed to take this banker hunting, my grandfather sent his gamekeeper out into the woods on the trail they were to take the next morning. It led through some birch and willow thickets, home to a number of old does, who had frequented this particular grove for years. These are not the deer we see here. These were roebucks, much smaller than North American deer and found throughout central Europe. They topped maybe 60 pounds, if that. They are about the size of key deer found on Pine Key in the Florida Keys. They’d left their droppings along this path in large and small piles, wherever they’d bedded down. The gamekeeper added two each of the French cough drops to the edge of the first two piles about a hundred yards apart and marked their locations with sticks laid out in an X, so that he could find them again the next day.

Early the next morning, my grandfather and his gamekeeper led the banker into the bush to stalk deer. When they got close to the first marked pile of deer scat, the gamekeeper, who was in the lead, faked a coughing fit, uttered a quiet curse, bent down, picked up the first two cough drops and slipped them into his mouth. When he saw this, the banker’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. He turned to my grandfather, who brought up the rear, and burst out excitedly: “Did you see that?”
“What?” my grandfather asked quietly.
“He’s eating deer shit!”
“Yes,” my grandfather answered, “he wants to cure his cough.”
“With deer shit? Good God, man, I never heard of such a thing in all my life. That’s disgusting. I can’t believe what I saw.”
“What,” my grandfather asked surprised, “you don’t know about this remedy, sir? Three or four-day-old deer shit is one of the oldest and best cough remedies in the world. Everyone around here knows that it’s the best tuberculosis-doctor.”
“Ah, you’re pulling my leg! That man’s only pretending,” parried the banker.
“Anton,” called my grandfather in answer, “our guest doesn’t believe that you chew a little deer shit as an antidote for your cough. He knows nothing about the curative qualities of this natural cough medicine!”
The gamekeeper turned around without a word and stuck out his green tongue, complete with two throat lozenges attached. The banker was dumbfounded. He sputtered and muttered under his breath and couldn’t calm himself. He had never seen anything like it. In the meantime, they were approaching the second pile. To reassure the banker, my grandfather bent down right in front of his hunting guest, also picked up what seemed to be two droppings and put them into his mouth as if it was the most commonplace thing to do.

The banker could not contain himself any longer. He spat in all directions and hollered: “I don’t believe what I’m seeing! They are really chewing and sucking on deer shit!”
My grandfather told him to calm himself and to keep quiet or they’d spook the deer. The banker continued to shake his head in disbelief. They had to show him their tongues again before he was finally convinced. No more was said and they continued the hunt.

The next morning, my grandfather went to pick up the banker, who had spent the night at a hunting cabin in the woods, with the gamekeeper in attendance to take care of his needs. When he got to the cabin, the gamekeeper opened the door and said:”Thank God you’re here, boss. Something terrible has happened. Your banker is lying inside and is in the throes of death! He won’t last another ten minutes!”
“Why? What’s his problem?” my grandfather asked in a loud voice.
“His gall bladder must have spilled over! He’s writhing in agony like a worm; he’s groaning and has green foam coming out of his mouth! You don’t know how glad I am to see you,” the gamekeeper unburdened himself.

They entered the cabin. The banker lay squirming and whimpering on his bed. “What’s going on? What is wrong with you?” my grandfather asked, pretending pity, in a quavering tone.
“I’m spilling over! I’m puking my guts out! I can’t hold it front or back! My navel is coming out of my mouth. God damned deer shit! I’ll never suck any again!” moaned the banker in agony.
“You poor man! How many did you take?” inquired my grandfather.
“About six or seven, I think. They must have been a bit too fresh,” he groaned.
“How could you take so many at once and un-aged ones at that? That’s a regular horse cure! No wonder your body protests,” my grandfather reproached. “Here drink some coffee. I’m sure you’ll feel better in a bit. We’ll leave you alone for half an hour.”

They needed the half hour as much as the banker, as they exploded with laughter once they got back outside. An hour later the banker emerged, dim-eyed and bent over, ready to hit the latrine. Without a word he packed his gear and made his way to the railroad station. They were rid of him for good.

They later learned that the banker claimed to his friends that the deer shit had cured his tapeworm. I guess those were the good old days.